Posted
by
Hemos
on Friday July 23, 1999 @01:18AM
from the we-want-our-stock-to-go-up dept.

Prop Head writes "Compaq today named Michael D. Capellas as their new CEO in a hastily called press conference. He was recruited in as the CIO in 1998 and was installed as COO after they tossed Piffer earlier this year. Could this be the end of Compaq's troubles? Time will tell. Click here to see what their P.R. types have to say about it. "

As a former DEC consultant, I'm very pleased that Compaq went this way as opposed to the rumors about bringing Palmer back to run the place. Palmer was a great axe man but I never had much confidence in him actually being able to run more than an auction. The rule of thumb in the late 80s/early 90s was if you showed a profit, you were sold. Of course this wasn't always good news for the likes of Quantum, Intel and Cabletron which were on the receiving end.

No, the time to buy is *after* the hideous 2nd quarter results come out on 7/28, operating losses plus restructuring costs are going to total at least 700 Million - don't buy before such an announcement. What is Compaq - a seller of crappy PC's with no support, or an Enterprise Vendor, better figure it out soon - time is wasting.

..met him at a SAP tradeshow back in May in Europe. We SEs were still building the booth. A guy in a dark suit appeared beside the booth. All he said, was: "Hi, I'm Mike"... took us a while to figure out he was the CIO. we were pretty impressed: normally these guys visit the booth for like 10 minutes, and you can't even see them because they are completely immersed in other suits protecting them from the real world.

Yeah, but Palmer was like that too. It's somewhat a hidden agenda to go over what's happening behind the scenes. When I used to do setup/breakdown in the 80s I was far more impressed by the DEC VPs that showed up in shorts and a sweatshirt and got their hands dirty. You felt that they cared about getting it done and had a vested interest in it happening. Suits hovering over setup (never breakdown since they were long gone at that point) always reminded me of the 4 DPW foremen standing around telling the one guy with the shovel to dig faster...

It is good to know that he wasn't above talking to the SEs but it's nice when they're also willing to dive into the trenches.

Boy does that all sound familiar. That was certainly part of the DEC spiral. Look at the comments about trying to sell VMS as open standards. The meeting comments especially. Nice to see that DEC lives on...